Well friends, it’s been a great journey, 26 parks over two, two-month-long road trips. We celebrated the end of this leg at Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado. These sand dunes are bigger than you see at the beach and we had a great day there!

So, what’s next? Keep an eye on the site and facebook for more pictures and blog posts from the last adventures- we might even have a blooper reel coming your way.

When will Season 3 start? We don’t know right now! It might be next summer, but it might not! We’ll keep you posted as we find out, and any other parks-related adventures that we stumble into! But above all, thanks for watching/reading!

This graphic (and a lot of this explanation) is credited to the NPS at this website, but we wanted to put an explanation on our blog since I explained it so poorly in the video! Essentially, multiple layers of harder rock and porous sandstone were deposited on a salt bed. The salt bed bulged in different places because of tectonic plate shifts, making the rock curve upwards and crack in parallel lines. Then, wind and water erosion (water + sandstone = calcite,) wore away at the layers. The ‘fins’ are generally the first part of forming an arch, but we saw some ‘arches’ that just looked like shallow caves hacked into the side of a HUGE rock. To make matters even more confusing, the right amount of rain is needed for this process, otherwise the rocks would a) never erode or b) erode too fast and collapse before the arch is formed. See why I had trouble explaining it on the spot in the video?

There are over 2,000 arches in the park but occasionally one collapses- at least 42 collapses have been recorded including this one in 2008.

Some of you (mom) may have noticed that nothing was posted last Thursday. Both of us have gone back to school and this has severely disrupted our editing and posting schedule! So from now on, we hope to have new videos out each Monday. Hey, it will be a little something to liven up the beginning of the work week! Without further ado, Capitol Reef National Park!